i was surprised by some of the ways in which michael characterized the data, michael malbin. what you will see is only today in the 2012 presidential cycle are the political parties just buy a little bit exceeding where they were in 2002, the 2002 cycle, which was in off-your aear election. just now the parties are pulling themselves off the map. the mccain-feingold deprived them of soft money. what mccain-feingold did is it shifted the weight of our campaign finance system away from the national political parties and towards outside groups. this was widely predicted by the critics of the mccain- feingold law. wahthat we see is tjhathat we are reaping the world with set in motion by mccain-feingold. it is true that the parties are now doing a better job in raising money and there has been an uptick since the last presidential election cycle in absolute terms. in relative terms, the parties are being left in the dust by the outside groups. that has had a dramatic affect on our political system in good ways in bad ways. the positive the effect has been that this is the most com